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Youngblood is an early Image Comicscomic book written by Rob Liefeld, based on a team he had created at the start of his career and planned to do as part of Gary Carlson's anthology series Megaton in the late 1980s, but put on hold when he got job offers from both Marvel and DC at the same convention. When he revived the concept in the early 1990s, he mixed in some ideas he had for the Teen Titans but never got to use, about a superhero team funded by the government to kill indiscriminately and have no obvious sense of morals. Interestingly it was the first book published under the Image banner, but its first issue was completed in 1991 before Image was officially formed. It was later rebooted by Alan Moore in Youngblood: Judgment Day, which is generally regarded as an improvement.

The series is one of Image's longest running, with its characters making frequent appearances as part of the superhero community in other Image publications such as Invincible, and Image United. A 2008 relaunch written by Joe Casey elevated the series to levels of adequacy. Unfortunately, this only lasted nine issues.

A new relaunch of the series began in 2012, published by Image comics, along with Glory, Supreme, and Bloodstrike.

Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: A sub-theme in the series was based on Liefeld's hypothesis that superheroes in real life would be treated just as celebrities and athletes are.

Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: ...sort of. Diehard has been a cyborg since the 40s, but in one of the later series he undergoes a series of upgrades to better perform his duties and comes out of the experience behaving much less human.

The Dark Age of Comic Books: Generally considered one of the faces of the era. The 2008 and 2012 series both make a point of lampshading the fact that Youngblood is almost anachronistic these days.

Dark Age of Supernames: Typically regarded as one of the Trope Codifiers, with the original team featuring Diehard, Badrock, Combat, Riptide, and Psi-Fire; a healthy chunk of its 13-man roster, all told.

Expy: Rob Liefeld's admitted that the team was simply a rejected Teen Titans pitch, right down to the redheaded archer Shaft being Speedy/Arsenal and Diehard being a S.T.A.R. Labs android.

As if Captain Ersatzing a lot of characters wasn't enough... a lot of the related super-teams who crossed over with Youngblood, such as Brigade, the Berzerkers and Bloodstrike, featured characters that were the same as Youngblood's members save for a quick costume change.

Eyes Always Shut: Everyone, though technically the eyes are "open", but black slits of shadow so they can't be seen, giving the impression they're clamped shut as tight as possible. Linkara refers to this as Youngblood's disease for a reason.

The Faceless: Diehard was first seen unmasked on-panel ten years after his debut

Gender Bender: As of the relaunched series, Photon- who was a male in the original- is now Lady Photon. Apparently his/her species switches genders every seven years.

Genre Deconstruction: The series tries to answer the question "What if superheroes were real?" The answer? They'd basically be reality TV stars. The series deals with similar themes found in Tiger & Bunny, such as the use of corporate sponsors and the pressures of stardom that a hero might encounter in the real world. A shocking number of the "heroes" are also shown to be outright assholes, especially in later volumes that tried to comment on the '90s Anti-Hero tropes that the title initially played straight.

Legacy Character: Doc Rocket, the daughter of the original Doc. There was also a Redeeming Replacement for Sentinel in the 2008 series, Sentinel 2.0. The 2012 relaunch also has Shaft quitting the team and getting replaced by a government-appointed successor.

Loads and Loads of Characters: More like, "Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads And Loads Of Characters", and many of them blatant ripoffs of other characters, Wolverine in particular.

According to Rob Liefeld, he almost had a deal for a cartoon on Fox Kids, which would've been created for the sole purpose of promoting an action figure line from Mattel. When Fox signed an exclusive deal with Marvel (thus killing Liefeld's cartoon in the cradle), Mattel dropped the idea for the toy line.

In-universe. Shaft would have to meet with the toy company to go over his action figures planned for the year. Four variants for 1993, and Badrock's gonna collect em all!

No Celebrities Were Harmed: The first issue feature a dictator (who's most definitely not Saddam Hussein) getting his head exploded.

And then there's the character Kirby, who's essentially Jack Kirby's head planted on a roided-up Cable body. "Respectfully dedicated to the memory of Jack Kirby".

One-Man Army: Shaft and Chapel. Interestingly, they're the only two unpowered members of the original team.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Played with in the relaunch. The heroes are briefly lead to believe that they won't be fighting crime any more. The government assures them that this won't be the case (though it's still not necessarily all real).

Remaster: For a hardcover release, Youngblood issues 1-5 were completely re-written (and we mean completely) by Joe Casey, with pages re-organized and plots completely overhauled to make it pass across as moderately coherent. Colors were also redone to remove the tackiness of Brian Murray's less thought out color schemes.

Replacement Scrappy: In-universe, the second Shaft. His teammates call him "not-Shaft", refusing to accept him as a genuine replacement for the original.

Retool: A hideously stupid one. In the penultimate issue if the rather decent 09' series, the issue featured a backup by Robert Liefeld in which Barack Obama set up his own Youngblood team. Seems perfectly fine, until the next issue completelt replaces the main story with the backup, giving a minor handwave to ONE plot point from the previous story and generally turning it into everything that made the original so infamous. Needless to say, no more issues came after that.

Shared Universe: Youngblood has ties to virtually every major Image title in some form or another. Chapel is the man who iced Al Simmons and sent him on the road to becoming Spawn. The team guest-starred in the original Wild CA Ts miniseries. Doc Rocket and Johnny Panic both owe their existence entirely to Moore's Supreme - they didn't appear directly but are related to characters introduced therein. Diehard did appear in Supreme, as a member of the Golden Age Allies of Justice (along with Superpatriot from Savage Dragon). And Suprema and Twilight, the series' Supergirl and Robin stand-ins, were members of the team during Moore's run.

The Straight and Arrow Path: Shaft, used a high-tech gravity-catapult longbow because he thought it looked cooler than a gun. In later series, he's not above using guns depending on the situation, but still strongly prefers the bow because he considers it to be irrevocably his "thing".

Take That: The first issue of Mark Millar's Youngblood: Bloodsport has two members of the titular superhero team receiving oral sex from gay cosplayers dressed as Wolverine and Cyclops.

Token Evil Teammate: The first issue of Youngblood has Psi-Fire explode an unarmed dictator's head... after telling him he admires what he's accomplished.

Then again, since the reactions of the rest of the team to this horrific, bloody murder range from indifference to resignation and mild annoyance, it's probably unfair to call him the only evil guy on the team

Trapped in TV Land: The Televillain goes on a rampage using the miracle of TiVo and ends up trapping a recent addition to the team on the set of Oprah. Shaft and Cougar go after her and briefly end up on a number of different shows, including a rerun of Seinfeld

Trick Arrow: Shaft plays with the trope. His arrows are the standard pointy variety, but he has a trick bow that doesn't require a string. (According to the tech manual, it uses focused artificial gravity to fire the arrows.) During Alan Moore's run, Golden Age hero Waxman tried to get Shaft to consider using trick arrows, giving examples of older archer heroes who used them. Not one of which had survived the experience.

Weight Woe: As an example of Early Installment Weirdness, Shaft apparently had an eating disorder during the team's first volume, and was very self conscious about his weight. The seventh issue included a Nightmare Sequence where he gorges himself and becomes obese. Strangely, this is one of the most original storylines created by Rob Liefeld, as it's virtually impossible to find comic books about male characters with eating disorders. This plot wasn't seen again in Shaft's later appearances.

West Coast Team: "Home" and "Away" teams. Later "Youngblood" and "Team Youngblood".

Wolverine Publicity: Badrock. He is an oddity in that his solo series was short-lived and he's much better known for Youngblood, but he was the star of the Marvel Team Up-like Badrock and Company and has had many crossover minis — including ones with Wolverine and Grifter!

Writing Around Trademarks: In the team's first appearance, Badrock's codename was "Bedrock". Liefeld decided to change the name to avoid confusion with the setting of The Flintstones (after a visit from Hanna Barbera's lawyers.)

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